ABSTRACT
Honour killings have been defined as ‘ … the killing of women for suspected deviation from sexual norms imposed by society’ (Faqir 2001: 66). Honour killings are extreme acts of violence perpetrated upon a woman when an honour code is believed to have been broken and perceived shame is brought upon the family. Women can also carry the burden for the shame of male violations of their sexual ‘honour’ and have been killed because they have fallen pregnant as victims of incest and rape. Being suspected of sexual deviancy such as pregnancy outside marriage or adulterous behaviour is also seen as enough to justify punishing a woman. What marks so-called honour killings is that it is not just the husband or partner that may carry out the act, but also the community and other family members such as mothers, brothers, uncles and cousins. The UN estimates 5,000 women are being killed each year in the name of
‘honour’ (UNFPA 2000). Honour killings have been documented in Bangladesh, Brazil, Ecuador, Egypt, India, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, Sweden, Turkey, Uganda and the UK (Sajid 2003). While more than 100 women are killed by their partners in England and Wales every year, the Metropolitan Police estimates that in 2003 there were approximately 12 honour killings across Sikh, Muslim and Christian communities (see Gupta 2003a). Southall Black Sisters (SBS), a campaigning group for the rights of minority ethnic women, deals with over 2,500 cases of domestic violence a year and reports over 20 honour killings in the UK between 2001 and 2003 (RWA 2003). While many of these reported cases come from the Pakistani, South Asian and Kurdish communities, African and Caribbean women are also affected by crimes of ‘honour’ (RWA 2003).2 In this sense the experiences of violence and of honour are not confined to women in Asian communities, or the preserve of Muslim communities. However, in the UK honour killing as a specifc phenomenon is perceived
by the media and government agencies as a crime that is practiced only
among certain minority ethnic groups. Thus, honour killings as domestic violence have become ‘ethnicised’ within the British multicultural context. While the authors recognise that ethnic groups and communities do have specific religious and cultural traditions which they may themselves label as honour-based, why, in the context of ethnicity, is domestic violence treated as a culturally specific honour crime by wider organisations and institutions? In this chapter we argue that ethnicised women3 are caught up in a collision of discourses. They are caught between the contradictions inherent within the cultural relativism of the British multicultural discourse and the private/ public divide which characterises the domestic-violence discourse. On one hand, these women are at personal risk from patriarchal, cultural and religious belief systems of ‘honour and shame’ that can lead to what have been popularly termed as ‘honour killings’. On the other hand, their personal risk is amplified as they are invisible to protective agencies and social services. Multiculturalism, which is underpinned by notions of ‘respecting diversity and valuing cultural difference’, unwittingly engenders non-intervention when dealing with domestic violence rooted in cultural and religious practices in the private sphere of the home. In this chapter we explore these contradictions and suggest that these women ‘slip through the cracks’ of both the domestic violence and the multicultural discourses. As Beckett and Macey argue,
Multiculturalism does not cause domestic violence, but it does facilitate its continuation through its creed of respect for cultural differences, its emphasis on non-interference in minority lifestyles and its insistence on community consultation (with male self defined community leaders). This has resulted in women being invisibilised, their needs ignored and their voices silenced.
